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Beacon Fire And Shooting Star
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Book Synopsis Beacon Fire and Shooting Star by : Xiaofei Tian
Download or read book Beacon Fire and Shooting Star written by Xiaofei Tian and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Liang dynasty (502-557) is one of the most brilliant and creative periods in Chinese history and one of the most underestimated and misunderstood. Under the Liang, literary activities, such as writing, editing, anthologizing, and cataloguing, were pursued on an unprecedented scale, yet the works of this era are often dismissed as "decadent" and no more than a shallow prelude to the glories of the Tang. This book is devoted to contextualizing the literary culture of this era--not only the literary works themselves but also the physical process of literary production such as the copying and transmitting of texts; activities such as book collecting, anthologizing, cataloguing, and various forms of literary scholarship; and the intricate interaction of religion, particularly Buddhism, and literature. Its aim is to explore the impact of social and political structure on the literary world.
Book Synopsis Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China by : Xiaorong Li
Download or read book Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China written by Xiaorong Li and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2013-05-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of poetry by women in late imperial China examines the metamorphosis of the trope of the "inner chambers" (gui), to which women were confined in traditional Chinese households, and which in literature were both a real and an imaginary place. Originally popularized in sixth-century "palace style" poetry, the inner chambers were used by male writers as a setting in which to celebrate female beauty, to lament the loneliness of abandoned women, and by extension, to serve as a political allegory for the exile of loyal and upright male ministers spurned by the imperial court. Female writers of lyric poetry (ci) soon adopted the theme, beginning its transition from male fantasy to multidimensional representation of women and their place in society, and eventually its manifestation in other poetic genres as well. Emerging from the role of sexual objects within poetry, late imperial women were agents of literary change in their expansion and complication of the boudoir theme. While some take ownership and de-eroticizing its imagery for their own purposes, adding voices of children and older women, and filling the inner chambers with purposeful activity such as conversation, teaching, religious ritual, music, sewing, childcare, and chess-playing, some simply want to escape from their confinement and protest gender restrictions imposed on women. Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China traces this evolution across centuries, providing and analyzing examples of poetic themes, motifs, and imagery associated with the inner chambers, and demonstrating the complication and nuancing of the gui theme by increasingly aware and sophisticated women writers.
Book Synopsis The Emperor's Feast by : Jonathan Clements
Download or read book The Emperor's Feast written by Jonathan Clements and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A galloping journey through thousands of years of Chinese culinary history . . . a timely reminder that the country's modern cuisine is the delicious fruit of a rich, ancient and perhaps surprisingly multicultural tradition' FUCHSIA DUNLOP, SPECTATOR 'A tasty portrait of a nation' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'A splendid introduction to the complex history of China' GUARDIAN 'A terrific read . . . Jonathan Clements writes with erudition and humour' DAILY MAIL 'This book is itself a feast, each chapter a sumptuous course' Frederik L. Schodt, author of My Heart Sutra 'Witty and insightful' Derek Sandhaus, author of Drunk in China **************** The history of China - not according to emperors or battles, but according to its food and drink. The Emperor's Feast is the epic story of a nation and a people, told through one of its most fundamental pillars and successful exports: food. Following the journeys of different ingredients, dishes and eating habits over 5,000 years of history, author and presenter Jonathan Clements examines how China's political, cultural and technological evolution and her remarkable entrance onto the world stage have impacted how the Chinese - and the rest of the world - eat, drink and cook. We see the influence of invaders such as the Mongols and the Manchus, and discover how food - like the fiery cuisine of Sichuan or the hardy dishes of the north - often became a stand-in for regional and national identities. We also follow Chinese flavours to the shores of Europe and America, where enterprising chefs and home cooks created new traditions and dishes unheard of in the homeland. From dim sum to mooncakes to General Tso's chicken, The Emperor's Feast shows us that the story of Chinese food is ultimately the story of a nation: not just the one that history tells us, but also the one that China tells us about itself.
Download or read book Poet-Monks written by Thomas J. Mazanec and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Thomas J. Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of Tang-dynasty China, asserted a bold new vision of poetry that proclaimed the union of classical verse with Buddhist practices of repetition, incantation, and meditation. Mazanec traces the historical development of the poet-monk as a distinct actor in the Chinese literary world, arguing for the importance of religious practice in medieval literature. As they witnessed the collapse of the world around them, these monks wove together the frayed threads of their traditions to establish an elite-style Chinese Buddhist poetry. Poet-Monks shows that during the transformative period of the Tang-Song transition, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of poetic innovation.
Book Synopsis Women in Early Medieval China by : Bret Hinsch
Download or read book Women in Early Medieval China written by Bret Hinsch and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-10-05 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important study provides the only comprehensive survey of Chinese women during the early medieval period of disunion, which lasted from the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty in 220 AD to the reunification of China by the Sui dynasty in 581 AD, also known as the Six Dynasties. Bret Hinsch offers rich descriptions of the most important aspects of female life in this era, including family and marriage, motherhood, political power, work, inheritance, education, and religious roles. He traces women’s lived experiences as well as the emotional life and the ideals they pursued. Building on the best Western and Japanese scholarship, Hinsch also draws heavily on Chinese primary sources and scholarship, most of which is unknown outside China. As the first study in English about women in the early medieval era, this groundbreaking book will open a new window into Chinese history for Western readers.
Book Synopsis Ancestral Memory in Early China by : K.E. Brashier
Download or read book Ancestral Memory in Early China written by K.E. Brashier and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancestral ritual in early China was an orchestrated dance between what was present (the offerings and the living) and what was absent (the ancestors). The interconnections among the tangible elements of the sacrifice were overt and almost mechanical, but extending those connections to the invisible guests required a medium that was itself invisible. Thus in early China, ancestral sacrifice was associated with focused thinking about the ancestors, with a structured mental effort by the living to reach out to the absent forebears and to give them shape and existence. Thinking about the ancestors—about those who had become distant—required active deliberation and meditation, qualities that had to be nurtured and learned. This study is a history of the early Chinese ancestral cult, particularly its cognitive aspects. Its goals are to excavate the cult’s color and vitality and to quell assumptions that it was no more than a simplistic and uninspired exchange of food for longevity, of prayers for prosperity. Ancestor worship was not, the author contends, merely mechanical and thoughtless. Rather, it was an idea system that aroused serious debates about the nature of postmortem existence, served as the religious backbone to Confucianism, and may even have been the forerunner of Daoist and Buddhist meditation practices.
Book Synopsis Literary History in and beyond China by :
Download or read book Literary History in and beyond China written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World explores the idea of literary history across the long span of the Chinese tradition. Although much scholarship on Chinese literature may be characterized as doing the work of literary history, there has been little theoretical engagement with received literary historical categories and assumptions, with how literary historical judgments are formed, and with what it means to do literary history in the first place. The present collection of essays addresses these questions from perspectives emerging both from within the tradition and from without, examining the anthological histories that shape the concept of a particular genre, the interpretive positions that impel our aesthetic judgments, the conceptual categories that determine how literary history is framed, and the history of literary historiography itself. As such, the essays collectively consider what it means to think through the framework of literary history, what literary history affords or omits, and what needs to be theorized in terms of literary history’s constraints and possibilities.
Download or read book Idle Talk written by Jack W. Chen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-09-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gossip and anecdote may be “idle talk,” but they also serve to knit together individuals in society and to provide the materials through which literary culture and historical memory are constructed. This groundbreaking book provides a cultural history of gossip and anecdote in traditional China, beginning with the Han dynasty and ending with the Qing. The ten essays, along with the introduction and postface, address the verification, transmission, and interpretation of gossip and anecdote across literary and historical genres. Contributors: Sarah M. Allen, Beverly J. Bossler, Jack W. Chen, Ronald Egan, Dore J. Levy, Stephen Owen, Graham Sanders, David Schaberg, Anna M. Shields, Richard E. Strassberg, Xiaofei Tian
Book Synopsis A Garden of Marvels by : Robert Ford Campany
Download or read book A Garden of Marvels written by Robert Ford Campany and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 300 and 600 C.E., Chinese writers compiled thousands of accounts of the strange and the extraordinary. Some described weird spirits, customs, and flora and fauna in distant lands. Some depicted individuals of unusual spiritual or moral achievement. But most told of ordinary people’s encounters with ghosts, demons, or gods; sojourns in the land of the dead; eerily significant dreams; and uncannily accurate premonitions. The selection of such stories presented here provides an alluring introduction to early medieval Chinese storytelling and opens a doorway to the enchanted world of thought, culture, and religious belief of that era. Known as zhiguai, or “accounts of anomalies,” they convey a great deal about how people saw the cosmos and their place in it. The tales were circulated because they were entertaining but also because their compilers meant to document the mysterious workings of spirits, the wonders of exotic places, and the nature of the afterlife. A collection of more than two hundred tales, A Garden of Marvels offers an authoritative yet accessible introduction to zhiguai writings, particularly those never before translated or adequately researched. This volume will likely find its way to bedside tables as well as into classrooms and libraries, just as collections of zhiguai did in early medieval times.
Download or read book Lore and Verse written by Yue Zhang and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lore and Verse is the first English-language book dedicated entirely to studying poems on history (yongshi shi) in premodern China. Focusing on works by poets from the entire range of early medieval China (220–589), Yue Zhang explores how history was disseminated and interpreted through poetry, as well as how and why certain historical figures were commemorated in poetry. In writing poems on history, poets retrospectively crafted their own identities through their celebration of historical figures, and they prospectively fortified a continuous lineage for transmitting their values and reputation to future generations. This continuous tradition of cultural memory informs a poet's reception of historical figures, which in turn shapes that tradition through further intertextual connections. Lore and Verse questions the sweeping generalization of early medieval Chinese poetry as consisting mainly of exuberant images and an ornamental style—an inaccurate characterization repeated by later historians and literary critics—and it provides translations, close readings, and analyses of selected poems on history that will be useful for students, instructors, and general readers interested in premodern Chinese literature and culture.
Book Synopsis The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History by : Andrew Chittick
Download or read book The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History written by Andrew Chittick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-28 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers a sweeping re-assessment of the Jiankang Empire (3rd-6th centuries CE), known as the Chinese "Southern Dynasties." It shows how, although one of the medieval world's largest empires, Jiankang has been rendered politically invisible by the standard narrative of Chinese nationalist history, and proposes a new framework and terminology for writing about medieval East Asia. The book pays particular attention to the problem of ethnic identification, rejecting the idea of "ethnic Chinese," and delineating several other, more useful ethnographic categories, using case studies in agriculture/foodways and vernacular languages. The most important, the Wuren of the lower Yangzi region, were believed to be inherently different from the peoples of the Central Plains, and the rest of the book addresses the extent of their ethnogenesis in the medieval era. It assesses the political culture of the Jiankang Empire, emphasizing military strategy, institutional cultures, and political economy, showing how it differed from Central Plains-based empires, while having significant similarities to Southeast Asian regimes. It then explores how the Jiankang monarchs deployed three distinct repertoires of political legitimation (vernacular, Sinitic universalist, and Buddhist), arguing that the Sinitic repertoire was largely eclipsed in the sixth century, rendering the regime yet more similar to neighboring South Seas states. The conclusion points out how the research re-orients our understanding of acculturation and ethnic identification in medieval East Asia, generates new insights into the Tang-Song transition period, and offers new avenues of comparison with Southeast Asian and medieval European history.
Book Synopsis Saying All That Can Be Said by : Keith McMahon
Download or read book Saying All That Can Be Said written by Keith McMahon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Saying All That Can Be Said, Keith McMahon presents the first full analysis of the sexually explicit portrayals in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Countering common views of those portrayals as “just sex” or as “bad sex,” he shows that they are rich in thematic meaning and loaded with social and aesthetic purpose. McMahon places the novel in the historical context of Chinese sexual culture, from which Jin Ping Mei inherits the style of the elegant, metaphorical description of erotic pleasure, but which the anonymous author extends in an exploration of the explicit, the obscene, and the graphic. The novel uses explicit description to evaluate and comment on characters, situations, and sexual and psychic states of being. Echoing the novel’s way of taking sex as a vehicle for reading the world, McMahon celebrates the richness and exuberance of Jin Ping Mei’s language of sex, which refuses imprisonment within the boundaries of orthodox culture’s cleanly authoritative style, and which continues to inspire admiration from readers around the world. Saying All That Can Be Said will change the way we think about sexual culture in premodern China.
Book Synopsis Bannermen Tales (Zidishu) by : Elena Suet-Ying Chiu
Download or read book Bannermen Tales (Zidishu) written by Elena Suet-Ying Chiu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bannermen Tales is the first book in English to offer a comprehensive study of zidishu (bannermen tales)—a popular storytelling genre created by the Manchus in early eighteenth-century Beijing. Contextualizing zidishu in Qing dynasty Beijing, this book examines both bilingual (Manchu-Chinese) and pure Chinese texts, recalls performance venues and features, and discusses their circulation and reception into the early twentieth century. With its original translations, musical score, and numerous illustrations of hand-copied and printed zidishu texts, this study opens a new window into Qing literature and provides a broader basis for evaluating the process of cultural hybridization. To go beyond readily available texts, author Elena Chiu engaged in intensive fieldwork and archival research, examining approximately four hundred hand-copied and printed zidishu texts housed in libraries in Mainland China, Taiwan, Germany, and Japan. Guided by theories of minority literature, cultural studies, and intertextuality, Chiu explores both the Han and Manchu cultures in the Qing dynasty through bannermen tales, and argues that they exemplified elements of Manchu cultural hybridization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries while simultaneously attempting to validate and perpetuate the superiority of Manchu identity. With its original translations, musical score, and numerous illustrations of hand-copied and printed zidishu texts, this study opens a new window into Qing literature and provides a broader basis for evaluating the process of cultural hybridization.
Book Synopsis The Poetics of Sovereignty by : Jack W. Chen
Download or read book The Poetics of Sovereignty written by Jack W. Chen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emperor Taizong (r. 626–49) of the Tang is remembered as an exemplary ruler. This study addresses that aura of virtuous sovereignty and Taizong’s construction of a reputation for moral rulership through his own literary writings—with particular attention to his poetry. The author highlights the relationship between historiography and the literary and rhetorical strategies of sovereignty, contending that, for Taizong, and for the concept of sovereignty in general, politics is inextricable from cultural production. The work focuses on Taizong’s literary writings that speak directly to the relationship between cultural form and sovereign power, as well as on the question of how the Tang negotiated dynastic identity through literary stylistics. The author maintains that Taizong’s writings may have been self-serving at times, representing strategic attempts to control his self-image in the eyes of his court and empire, but that they also become the ideal image to which his self was normatively bound. This is the paradox at the heart of imperial authorship: Taizong was simultaneously the author of his representation and was authored by his representation; he was both subject and object of his writings.
Download or read book One Who Knows Me written by Anna Shields and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The friendships of writers of the mid-Tang era (780s–820s)—between literary giants like Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, Han Yu and Meng Jiao, Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi—became famous through the many texts they wrote to and about one another. What inspired mid-Tang literati to write about their friendships with such zeal? And how did these writings influence Tang literary culture more broadly? In One Who Knows Me, the first book to delve into friendship in medieval China, Anna M. Shields explores the literature of the mid-Tang to reveal the complex value its writers discovered in friendship—as a rewarding social practice, a rich literary topic, a way to negotiate literati identity, and a path toward self-understanding. Shields traces the evolution of the performance of friendship through a wide range of genres, including letters, prefaces, exchange poetry, and funerary texts, and interweaves elegant translations with close readings of these texts. For mid-Tang literati, writing about friendship became a powerful way to write about oneself and to reflect upon a shared culture. Their texts reveal the ways that friendship intersected the public and private realms of experience and, in the process, reshaped both.
Book Synopsis Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature (vol. 2) by :
Download or read book Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature (vol. 2) written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At last here is the long-awaited, first Western-language reference guide focusing exclusively on Chinese literature from ca. 700 B.C.E. to the early seventh century C.E. Alphabetically organized, it contains no less than 1095 entries on major and minor writers, literary forms and "schools," and important Chinese literary terms. In addition to providing authoritative information about each subject, the compilers have taken meticulous care to include detailed, up-to-date bibliographies and source information. The reader will find it a treasure-trove of historical accounts, especially when browsing through the biographies of authors. Indispensable for scholars and students of pre-modern Chinese literature, history, and thought. Part Two contains S to Xi.
Book Synopsis Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature (Vol. I) by :
Download or read book Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature (Vol. I) written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At last here is the long-awaited, first Western-language reference guide focusing exclusively on Chinese literature from ca. 700 B.C.E. to the early seventh century C.E. Alphabetically organized, it contains no less than 1095 entries on major and minor writers, literary forms and "schools," and important Chinese literary terms. In addition to providing authoritative information about each subject, the compilers have taken meticulous care to include detailed, up-to-date bibliographies and source information. The reader will find it a treasure-trove of historical accounts, especially when browsing through the biographies of authors. Indispensable for scholars and students of pre-modern Chinese literature, history, and thought. Part One contains A to R.
